Amazon more or less won didn't it?
It doesn't have total domination of ecommerce but frankly it'd run into anti-trust issues if it did. No company is going to do ecommerce bigger than amazon without getting broken up so yeah... amazon.
It doesn't have total domination of ecommerce but frankly it'd run into anti-trust issues if it did. No company is going to do ecommerce bigger than amazon without getting broken up so yeah... amazon.
If coupons and discounts are the best the competition have to offer, then Amazon doesn’t have too much to worry about.
(1) Yes, I know that Amazon sells some millions or some such different products, but my experience shopping (recently moved and have done a LOT of shopping) is that the company making the product can have a good enough Web site that shows much wider range of products, e.g., for wool blankets many more colors and patterns.
(2) To me the key to Amazon is their quite well done Web site that makes it easy (a) to find products and (b) to get relatively good information about them. But can do well on (a) with just keyword searching at Google, Bing. For (b) can do well at the Web site of company making (importing, whatever) the product.
Then, yes, Amazon also pleases customers with better, faster, cheaper shipping options, their Prime program, good returns policies, relatively close warehouses (Walmart stands to do really well on this as they get their Web site polished), customer reviews of products, Amazon Choice house brand, one account for all the wide Amazon product choices instead of (having to type in banking, shipping details for) accounts at each of a few dozen companies, etc. I have found that if just go shopping at whatever on-line retail sites, can get some bad products, worse than my experience at Amazon; so, Amazon can have some trust from selecting relatively good product. It may be that Amazon can be responsive: The mid-tower case server I built supports error correcting coding (ECC) on both the motherboard and the processor; so I explained to Amazon that for their main memory sticks (DIMMs, duel in-line memory modules) they should offer ECC; they did, and maybe my suggestion helped. Still, IMHO the keys to Amazon have been just (a) and (b).
From the shopping I've done recently, it appears that a lot of retail Web sites just copy a LOT of software architecture and design from the Amazon Web site. So, we can expect that building such a retail Web site is becoming a widely, well understood art and, thus, no longer an advantage for Amazon. Indeed, the company might host their site at Amazon's cloud server farm AWS -- irony here!
Net, it looks to me like the US manufacturers and/or importers can start to do well cutting out the middleman Amazon. Ah, Internet disintermediation!!
Uh, shipping from many local warehouses? When I was at FedEx, and maybe still, shippers could just truck their inventory to Memphis and, thus, get faster, cheaper delivery to their customers -- order in before midnight and delivery before 10 AM the next day, that is, in about 10 hours. Well, FedEx and UPS could still do such -- open a few hundred warehouses, let vendors stock the warehouses with big trucks and deliver to customers with little trucks (bicycles, taxicabs, drones?). Again, a dozing if not sleeping giant here is Walmart.
Case in point: I'm in the market for a new TV. Based on my experience with prior TVs, I believe I want something with high contrast, low reflections (glare), low response time, and high color gamut coverage. Well, some balance of those criteria weighed against price. I'm new to the TV market: how do I find this (on Amazon or elsewhere?)
If I expand, the situation might seem worse. I'm tangentially familiar with two modern display technologies: LCD and LED. I know LEDs offer higher contrast and quicker response time. So I search for LED TV on Amazon. Most of the results do indeed have "LED" and "TV" in the name, and nothing on the product page suggests anything different. But look up detailed specs for that model (which takes some determination in and of itself) and it has none of the characteristics of an LED TV. The contrast is low, the response time is high, in fact it turns out it's an LCD TV! Apparently the industry markets using LED to mean LED _backlight_, which to me was misleading. So what class of TV will get me what I'm after? There are places to figure it all out, but Amazon sure as hell isn't one of them. Nor is Best Buy, Walmart, or most other retailers you've heard of. They still do an awful job helping you find what you're looking for in many cases.
https://www.techhive.com/article/3316544/best-tvs.html
https://thewirecutter.com/electronics/tvs/
https://thewirecutter.com/guides/buying-a-tv/
For a mail order / online retailer, visit this page at Crutchfield:
https://www.crutchfield.com/g_146350/All-TVs.html
Then click the red text "Explore Articles & Videos", just above the listings on the right side. Their TV Buying Guide has good visual explanation of LED-LCD vs. OLED, for instance.
Depending what you look for, calling them and chatting can work too.
// Keep in mind with any review site or retailer, paid review placement can be a thing.